The power mess on long Island

Shortly after Hurricane Sandy knocked out the power for millions of people in the Northeast, Gov. Andrew Cuomo began hammering New York’s utilities for their inadequate response to the disaster. They were not “God-given monopolies,” he said. And last week he called for a special investigative commission to determine why the state’s utilities — in particular the hapless Long Island Power Authority — left so many people in the dark and cold for so long.

Mr. Cuomo was right to call for an investigation. But if the investigators are diligent, they will find that one of the problems — and also one of the answers for a more reliable system — lies right in the governor’s office.

The governor of New York has much to say about the state’s power systems, including Long Island’s main utility. He appoints 9 of the 15 members of LIPA’s board, which now has five openings. The governor could and should have filled three of these positions long ago. The authority has been without a permanent chief executive for two years, and the acting executive announced last week that he would resign. Many important management positions are occupied by political appointees.

Mr. Cuomo says that he has been planning for some time to overhaul LIPA and streamline the state’s utility system. But allowing such managerial ineptitude to fester was bound to lead to disaster, as alarmingly documented by Hurricane Sandy. About 90 percent of the authority’s customers lost power, in part because of inexcusably poor planning by people with little knowledge of or interest in the electricity business. An investigation by The Times revealed that as Sandy bore down on the Eastern seaboard, the authority’s trustees spent essentially no time worrying about its impact. The chairman later explained that they believed a plan was in place.

Further inquiries showed that the authority had failed to take the most elementary precautions despite the lessons of Tropical Storm Irene, which left a half-million of its customers without power in August 2011. Trees, for example, had long gone untrimmed, exposing power lines to falling branches. Workers seeking to restore power had to rely on an antiquated system and paper maps to determine exactly where power lines were damaged.

The Long Island authority was originally created by the governor’s father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, to help close the Shoreham nuclear power plant and cut costs to consumers. Yet its 1.1 million customers now pay some of the highest rates in the country.

Obviously, as the governor has noted, the system has been poorly managed and needs an overhaul. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is also conducting an investigation. The end result of both his inquiry and the governor’s should be a dispassionate record of what went wrong and, even more important, a road map for a more professional and less political utility.